Welcome to my garden. Come in, take off your shoes, and let me offer you a seat in the shade, a cool drink, and friendly conversation while we enjoy the beauty of the day...

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Flylady Gone Wrong

Sunny is just going to have to forgive me for sharing this story, because it is just too funny not to.

K, so some of you know that I am a great fan of the Flylady system. Basically, you set up routines that help you to manage your home (the cleaning, bill paying, meal making) easily and efficiently. It really works. Honest.

So, I have been telling my good friend Sunny about it for a few years. She is overwhelmed a lot of the time. A SAHM with 3 Sprouts, a large garden that needs attention, dance classes, church obligations, piano lessons, and a million other things distract her from having the sparkling clean and stress free home that she dreams of.

She decided to give it a whirl just recently (after I loaned her the Flylady book "Sink Reflections"). The very FIRST thing that Flylady asks you to do is Shine Your Sink. She believes that "as the kitchen goes, so does the rest of the house", so it is important that your sink be empty and sparkling every night before you go to bed.

Sunny was doing really well this particular day. She had laundry in the machine, all the dishes from the sink in the dishwasher and that running, she had showered and was dressed to the shoes. Next on the list came the actual "Cleaning of the Sink". This is where you scrub out the sink and then fill it to the top with hot bleach water to disinfect and really shine it up.

Well, Sunny has a well, and that water pressure was not doing so well with the laundry AND dishwasher going at the same time. The sink was filling really, really slowly. Well, while Sunny was waiting, the dryer buzzed. Sunny figured that she had plenty of time to go switch loads in the laundry and get back in time to shut off the water in her sink.

Sunny went into the laundry room and did the whole switching of laundry thing. Of course, since she is trying to get a handle on the household chores, she folded the laundry right away. Then she got distracted by sorting piles of laundry and setting aside torn or terribly stained items to be made into rags.

After quite a while, the smell of bleach wafted into the laundry room, waking Sunny to the realisation that she had been in there for a LONG TIME, and had left the water running in the sink.

She ran into the kitchen to find the floor 3 inches deep in bleachy water, the counters flooded and everything on them soaked, the lower cupboards full of water, even the drawer that holds her hot pads and oven mitts full of several inches of bleachy, stinky water.

Poor Sunny. She called me, and the first words out of her mouth were "This Flylady thing does NOT work!" It took her the rest of the day to clean it up and sort through everything that had been on the counters.

Of course, the up-side to all this is that when Mr. Sunny came home that night Sunny was showered in compliments on how hard she must have worked to get the kitchen so sparkling clean that day. Mr. Sunny was very impressed!

4 comments:

Now that was funny.I do have a question though.How do I politely introduce the Missus to the Flylady site?I do not want her to take offense, but I think it would help her feel more in control of the house and kids.

Thomas-*giggle* You are asking for a miracle! NO woman wants to be told that she might not be the best housekeeper in the universe....

However, I would say that your best bet would be:

1. Wait until she is feeling overwhelmed or complaining about how much work there is to do and how hard it is to get it all done.

2. Be all sympathetic for a little bit.

3. Pretend like you just thought of something and tell her that there is this blogger chick online who swears by the Flylady system, and that she might like to look at it sometime.

I will not guarantee that this will save you from dirty looks and being cut off from sex for a while cuz, honestly, I can't think of any time that I would allow Mr. Barefoot to make suggestions on how to keep house better without getting pissed.

*chuckle* I know some people love Flylady. I don't. I mean, it's not that I HATE Flylady, I just don't particularly care for the way it "worked" in my life. I knew pretty much right off the bat that it wouldn't work for me, when her first directions were to get completely dressed, INCLUDING SHOES for the day, regardless of whatever else you're doing that day. Sorry, I'm NOT going to spend my days off dressed to the nines when my PJ's are what's most comfortable, and shoes in the house are a massive NO NO in my house! *chuckle* After that, it was all down hill for me & Flylady. (That, and I tried shining my sink only to discover that THAT MUCH WATER in my sink causes leaks in the spot where the sink meets the pipes. *wry smile*)

Hope Sunny has more luck with Flylady than I had, at least from here on out.